As many of you know, Reed and I lived for three years in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, México. Pátzcuaro is a small city—a Pueblo Mágico ("Magic Pueblo") on Mexico's Eje Volcánico (Volcanic Axis) at 7,000 ft. about 250 miles west of Mexico City. We treasure the generous hospitality extended to us by this historic Mexican community.
While there, we were introduced us to the work of Gustavo Esteva, activist and 'de-professionalized' intellectual living in Oaxaca, one of the southernmost and poorest of Mexican states. Esteva presents the practice of hospitality as a traditional Mesoamerican way of life:
"For thousands of years, peoples of this area of the world have been hospitable toward the 'other' as a way of being in this world. All their original cosmologies conceive the 'other' as the only way to define oneself: the other is not really an alien, a foreigner, but the other part of oneself. But for 500 years these peoples have been constantly invaded by inhospitable people.
"By extending hospitality to the Spaniards, the people were colonized. By hosting other gods, their own gods were destroyed. By hosting 'development,' their environment and livelihood were seriously damaged. It seems to be a miracle that after all such experiences they could still retain hospitality as a defining trait. They have done so because they know that [hospitality] is not only a condition for survival, but also the only way to live."Learning Spanish is turning out to be a life-changing experience. For us it involves learning to see the world—to structure reality—in new ways. I've been surprised to learn a new word in class while thinking, "Hmmm, never heard that word before," only to be astonished to hear the word seemingly everywhere in the following hours and days. That's been my experience with the word 'community'.
At first, I thought 'community' was truly lived just here in Mexico, but in the last week or so I've been astonished to discover evidence of grassroots communities flourishing in the most unlikely places in the U.S. as well. This blog series titled 'Green Shoots' relates my journey of discovering community.
At the end of November 2009, I had knee replacement surgery. During convalescence and rehabilitation, I read a lot. To my surprise, the novels I had chosen shared a common theme: namely, the power of community among poor and marginal people based on a web of caring rooted in dignity, respect, and a sense of mutual obligation.
Here's what I read—all in English: La Maravilla by Alfredo Véa, El Milagro [Miracle] Beanfield War by John Nichols, Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts (most poignantly, the chapters set in the shantytowns of Moombai-Bombay, India).
I also read Gustavo Esteva's powerful, thought-provoking, Grassroots Post-Modernism: Remaking the soil of cultures. Esteva comes from a proud Mexican family with both Spanish (paternal) and indigenous (maternal) roots. As Esteva tells it, he benefited from educational opportunities made available to people in 'underdeveloped' countries—the quotes are Esteva's to indicate he never felt 'underdeveloped'.
After completing his government-sponsored education, Esteva began professional life as a Human Resource Manager first for IBM, then for Procter-Gamble. He subsequently left corporate life to work at the highest policy levels in the development arena for the Mexican government. It is important to note that 40% of Mexico's economy is informal; that is, it is a cash economy outside the formal, developed economy. Update: Recent government statistics, revised to include domestic workers, farmworkers and low-level employees working (illegally) on a cash basis in corporations, indicate that 60% of Mexico's workers labor in the informal sector.
Disillusioned by the potential of the neoliberal model to provide full employment, Esteva moved to Oaxaca. From Oaxaca he has worked with activist movements all over Mexico, most notably with the Zapatista movement in Chiapas. Esteva is recognized as a leading global critic of the development model.
In Grassroots Post-Modernism, Esteva argues powerfully against the Global [Development] Project championed by first world nations. He argues that the Global Project will never be able to provide work for all the peoples of the earth, then concludes that it is necessary to find spaces for the subsistence economies of marginal people to continue alongside, but separate from, the formal Developing-Developed global economy.
"We know very well that things can be operated at the human scale, at a scale of real people who know each other and can take decisions. Of course, we recognize that there are areas in the cities in which they are so individualized [that is, a system based on individual rights, rather than on communal mutual obligations] that they cannot take decisions together.
"Also, we know that many people in the cities ... want representatives, and they want to be governed by others. [They say:] 'I pay him. I elect him. I want honest people and professional people to deal with all these problems. I want to take care of my own business and other people will do the government'.
"What we see as our real challenge is how we can have the harmonious coexistence of the two different systems. Let them have their representatives. Let them have their administrators. For them, not for us. Let's share some spaces, but basically have different ways of doing things.At the heart of Gustavo Esteva's thinking are two core ideas: hospitality and community.
"This is not imperialism in reverse. It is not saying that we want to impose on them our own way. The people in the communities [indigenous villages where land is owned and worked collectively], the people in the barrios [urban neighborhoods] have a way, and we want to keep that way going. We will respect other people who want another way. And the other way can be something like elections for representatives. Something like representative democracy."
"A community ... is a group of people linked by obligation, by mutual obligations, not by rights. ...this is the original meaning of the word community in Latin, in Rome ...the very modern Western idea of individual rights [has been superimposed] on the notion of real community; that is, a community of people [linked by] obligations. And that is for two hundred years only. In two hundred years, with the creation of the nation-state, with the creation of the possessive individual, with homo economicus, we have created this idea of individual rights as the stuff and foundation of the society.
"Again, radical democracy is basically a language of freedom, and freedom includes respect for the 'other'; it includes looking for harmony."Esteva advocates striving to replace tolerance with hospitality:
"...we are trying to go from tolerance to hospitality. This is something that I have been writing about for the last twenty years. To be tolerant implies that I am assuming that the other is not the right way. The color of his skin, or his religion, or whatever, are not the right way. But I am so generous that I am tolerating him, tolerating his presence. The dictionary says that 'tolerance' is 'to suffer with patience' and sometimes the people who tolerate lose their patience and stop being tolerant. Of course, it is better to be tolerant than intolerant, but still tolerance is only the most civilized form of intolerance.
"We are saying that we are talking about hospitality, in which to be hospitable towards the other does not imply that you follow the other, that you admire the other, that you like or dislike the other, but [it means] that you accept profoundly that he has the same right that you have to be here on the planet. You open your arms, and your life, your heart to the other being very different, to his/her 'otherness'.
"What I am trying to say is, when you are talking about hospitable society, radical democracy means for us a society in which different people, people who are fundamentally different, can co-exist in harmony through a hospitable attitude about the other. In our view, that means the Western tradition is basically a tradition of inhospitality. A Westerner may or may not tolerate the other but he cannot hospitably accept him. He tries to transform the other into someone like him, to create something that can be described as one world, with whatever kind of cross or sword, with many different purposes.
"What the Zapatistas are saying, that is our belief now, is that we want a world in which many worlds can be embraced. Radical democracy implies how we can have a kind of intercultural dialogue with the others and co-exist in harmony. The society of the different. How can we organize this harmonious coexistence of the different? All that is radical democracy for me."So there you have it at the grassroots level—sights and sounds of traditional Mesoamerican community seeding Green Shoots in our post-modern world.
Still Curious?
There is a lot more to Esteva's work than could be covered in a single post. If you're up to having your fundamental assumptions about what it means to be human challenged, Grassroots Post-Modernism is for you (available used from Amazon.com).
Poking around on the Internet for more about Gustavo Esteva, I discovered an interview with him on the web site of In Motion Magazine. Titled "The Society of the Different," this excellent four-part interview quotes at length and verbatim from Grassroots Post-Modernism. Web address: http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/global/gest_int_2.html. More accessible than Esteva's book, one eye-opening segment reviews the history of maís (corn) in the traditional, Mesoamerican culture and the indigenous cosmovisión (worldview).
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